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Motile microorganisms, like bacteria and algae, unify abilities like self-propulsion, autonomous navigation, and decision-making on the micron scale. While recent breakthroughs have led to the creation of synthetic microswimmers and…
Light carries energy and momentum. It can therefore alter the motion of objects from atomic to astronomical scales. Being widely available, readily controllable and broadly biocompatible, light is also an ideal tool to propel microscopic…
How systems are endowed with migration capacity is a fascinating question with implications ranging from the design of novel active systems to the control of microbial populations. Bacteria, which can be found in a variety of environments,…
When a large number of similar entities interact among each other and with their environment at a low scale, unexpected outcomes at higher spatio-temporal scales might spontaneously arise. This nontrivial phenomenon, known as emergence,…
Living organisms rely on molecular networks, such as gene circuits and signaling pathways, for information processing and robust decision-making in crowded, noisy environments. Recent advances show that interacting biomolecules…
This article summarizes some of the open questions in the field of active matter that have emerged during Active20, a nine-week program held at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) in Spring 2020. The article does not provide…
Bioconvection, a phenomenon arising from the collective motion of motile microorganisms, plays a crucial role in shaping microbial distributions, fluid dynamics, and bloom formation in aquatic environments. While extensive research has…
Spectacular collective phenomena such as jamming, turbulence, wetting, and waves emerge when living cells migrate in groups.
We review recent advances in the design, synthesis, and modeling of active fluids. Active fluids have been at the center of many technological innovations and theoretical advances over the past two decades. Research on this new class of…
The social organization of microorganisms has long been a fascinating and challenging subject in both biology and sociology. In these organisms, the role of the individual is far less dominant than that of the community, which functions as…
Intelligent soft matter stands at the intersection of materials science, physics, and cognitive science, promising to change how we design and interact with materials. This transformative field seeks to create materials that possess…
A wide range of experimental systems including gliding, swarming and swimming bacteria, in-vitro motility assays as well as shaken granular media are commonly described as self-propelled rods. Large ensembles of those entities display a…
Active systems -- including sperm cells, living organisms like bacteria, fish, birds, or active soft matter systems like synthetic ''microswimmers'' -- are characterized by motility, i.e., the ability to propel using their own ''engine''.…
What makes living systems flexible so that they can react quickly and adapt easily to changing environments? This question has not only engaged biologists for decades but is also of great interest to computer scientists and engineers who…
We study the emergence of the collective spatio-temporal macroscopic properties of the immune system, by representing individually the elementary interactions between its microscopic components (antibodies, antigens, cytokines). The results…
Cells and microorganisms employ dynamic shape changes to enable steering and avoidance for efficient spatial exploration and collective organization. In contrast, active colloids, their synthetic counterparts, currently lack similar…
We present a model of soft active particles that leads to a rich array of collective behavior found also in dense biological swarms of bacteria and other unicellular organisms. Our model uses only local interactions, such as Vicsek-type…
Complex systems, in many different scientific sectors, show coarse-grain properties with simple growth laws with respect to fundamental microscopic algorithms. We propose a classification scheme of growth laws which includes human aging,…
Essentially all biology is active and dynamic. Biological entities autonomously sense, com- pute, and respond using energy-coupled ratchets that can produce force and do work. The cytoskeleton, along with its associated proteins and motors,…
Active glassy matter has recently emerged as a novel class of non-equilibrium soft matter, combining energy-driven, active particle movement with dense and disordered glass-like behavior. Here we review the state-of-the-art in this field…